on Damien Hirst

thought i'd continue the Young British Artists thing going and talk of DH. i first saw a shark at 'Sensation' in 1997. he paid the australian shark hunter Vic Hislop $10,000 to kill the creature. Hirst continued to source his sharks from Hislop when he needed to replace the eroding one in 2006.

the pickled animal pieces - shark, zebra, sheep, cow, etc are a bit like old time exhibits from a circus, and thats what i like about them. there is an accidental reference point to freak shows, and 'see the amazing creature from the deep' type of stuff.

i'm pretty sure Hirst hasn't quoted this influence.

the only thing missing is the beautiful old hand painted signs. they'd look better...

otherwise they bore me. shock tactics/murder given quasi intellectual turns of phrase. i'd rather see a living specimen.

on Tracey Emin

i've never thought much of Tracey Emin. the work has always maintained a kind of forced rawness, leaving it a little vacuous and lacking in intent. the Young British Artists tag was good timing for her, and i can appreciate that she has forged a career making the art she does.


her 2011 appointment at the Royal Academy as Professor of Drawing - only the 2nd woman since the RA founded in 1768! - is a bit of a strange one - she can't draw. her drawings get raved about - the passion! stripped bare!.... but i don't buy it.























The images above and right are by Egon Schiele. he has influenced a number of contemporary artists, including Emin. But where Emin 'scribbles' sexuality, he draws it. but don't get wrong, i know the art barricades are down and anything goes....


i just don't see the substance in Emins work, she so desperately wants there to be meat that there ends up being very little, and that sort of search has its finality in self consciousness and an awkwardness for the sake of being awkward. She has said,"There are some days when i can draw and some days when i can't draw". The drawing of the Queen, bottom, was what sort of day?

on Lowbrow and Highbrow

the terms - 'Lowbrow', and 'Highbrow' - have quite strange beginnings. they come from the 19th Century science of Phrenology - how the shape of ones skull dictated levels of intelligence. it was cut and dry - a 'high' forehead meant you were smart, a 'low' forehead meant you were stupid.
it set up forms of cultural divide in all sorts of ways - and spawned pseudo-superiority complexes that at worst would manifest in acts of genocide throughout the 20th Century.

 In 'ART', the terms are more blurred now than they have been. but when 'Lowbrow Art' emerged in the 1960s, some of the art world reacted like it was the 1860s and metaphysically reached for their Phrenology texts.
Lowbrow took the influence of the street and emerged out of posters and comics, cartoons and the drug scene.
Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb are a few names who were there at the beginning of modern lowbrow. Peter Max got lucky when General Electric decided to use his stuff on clocks.
Lowbrow has come a long way since then. A lot of imagery fits into it, so much so that its hardly a term at all anymore. Its swallowed up via mass information and general acceptance.
It is mostly 'non-intellectual' in that it normally doesn't require too much chin stroking or wrinkled brow discourse. it is immediate and generally does not pretend to be otherwise. thats why i like it, its empty and fun. 

on postcolonialism

i live in a land full of ancient medicine, maybe the oldest on earth. some of the stuff the indigenous people got up to we will never understand - the magnetics of the land, sky and sea and the unseen spaces of magic, dreaming and song.
its a land that was 'discovered' by the English in the 18th Century, and who rather than look at the ways  they could be educated, decided their way was best and imposed themselves with arrogance and violence.
250 years later, nothing much has changed.

they have a lack of adaptation, a unpreparedness of the great silent spaces and untamed nature of this place. and it slowly gets a hold of them, and the more they struggle to bring 'the old country' here with them, the more the potent spells of this land work their way.

and in that stiff upper lip british manner they deny what may be happening, and proceed to attempt to force their code upon things, still wearing metaphysical red coats.

but it is not going to work, post-colonialism is in action through the forces of nature, and through the souls of the land.

on Barnett Newmans 'Zips'

 Newman called the stripes in his paintings "zips". Which gives you this idea that you can peel apart the canvas to reveal a sub-reality to the new beauty he was investigating. he felt that old standards of beauty were irrelevant, and that the modern world had made traditional style and subject invalid.

the emptiness of the works is punctuated by the zips, declaring the void with something that references human construct. i see them as a reminder of our timelines - life - our passage through time and nothingness.

the zips are something, they operate and guide.
they act like lines on a road, to keep us from disappearing into the grains of the cosmos. they zip open a truth in much the same way zen philosophy does. "everyday life is the path".

even though Newman said that he did not divide space, i think he does, but that does not mean the pictures become restricted or confined. the zips actually expand the horizons he presents, our eyes going beyond the picture frame in search of the continuation. space is divided, and then multiplied.
when asked about what his paintings could mean to the world, he said,"if read properly, the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism".

on Velazquez

i was thinking about Diego Velazquez today. is he the greatest? he just may be. the oval shaped room in the Prado that is dedicated to him blew my mind.
Saint Thomas on the left is tough and faultless, earthy tones of time frozen fabric cloak Thomas' questioning point of view, but whose possession of book and staff show an unwavering commitment of faith. Look at the firm grip Thomas has on the heavy book for testimony to this, it is beautifully painted. You feel the weight. The composition makes us think he is moving across the canvas, perhaps on his way to Madras in India, where he completed his mission, and where his bones are on display in the San Thome Basilica.










the picture on the left - the infanta dona margarita of austria - is a psychedelic masterpiece - it shimmers like silver in the sun, wet with glory. the organic monster of fabric looms toward the elfin face of the child who is almost lost in the swarms of cloth. its a large painting, whose colour has an unusual milky vibrance. i stared at it for ages, overwhelmed and in love with its weird mystery.

'the triumph of bacchus - the drunkards', and 'the fable of arachne - the spinners' are painted about 30 years apart. the latter not long before his death. the earlier work is stamped in the earth, almost sculptural - like the St Thomas painting its bold and chunky - Velazquez more than confident in his unique ability.

'the Spinners' hovers, your eye drifts along its wispy but no less solid composition. its not as dense as 'the drunkards' and we get more involved somehow. perhaps because its casual, like we have walked into the room that is full of activity. the figure in the  foreground to the left is my all time favourite female in any painting ever made - i know its a big call - but i can think of none better.

Viva Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez!

on a coastal caravan park

Sand and gravel avenues access the caravans that are here permanently and semi-permanently. They used to be decorated with plants and other objects that were chosen by the owner to make their place unique, to give it personality. Now they all look similar, aside from the hint of tone from a curtain or the colour of the manufacturers stripe on the van, most of which have faded. It’s like that because those that run the park said one year, ”No plants”, denying the occupants an opportunity of free expression. But you are allowed a television antenna, and your decking out the front must not exceed 1.2 metres in width...?!   5000 bucks a year to leave it there but you are only allowed to use it for a limited amount of days. it feels like a ghost town. I still kind of like it. 

on Philistines and/or Dilettantes

the 'Philistines' pictured on the left are carved into a wall at Medinet Habu - a place near the west bank of the Nile at ancient Thebes. they are depicted there because its Ramses 3s' mortuary temple, and he stopped them invading Egypt around 1200 BC. one of the more famous Philistines was Goliath of Gath - the big guy who went down after being struck by Davids slingshot in a bible story.

There is a more modern variety - defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "a person who is hostile or indifferent to the arts". A recent case of this (2003) was when the Baghdad Antiquities Museum (BAM!) wasn't protected during the invasion and over 7000 pieces remain missing or destroyed. some of these will have pride of place in a safe, on a mantlepiece, in a cupboard or buried in the desert wrapped in a rag.
These 'collectors' are a form of Dilettante.
"A person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge."

Another form of Dilettante has the wrong idea about art. The acceptance as an artist, or as an artistic observer, seems far more important to them than the making of art. Yet some are hungry to be called an artist. They've put ART on a shelf that is slightly out of reach - their fingertips can just touch it, its agonisingly close, but no stepladder - physical or metaphysical - is going to get them there.

"art is more state of mind than way of life", said Rube Timinger as he explored inner space.

on Sergio Leones' 'the good, the bad, and the ugly'

i first saw 'the good, the bad, and the ugly' at the drive-in cinema as a kid. i've since seen it a hundred times or more and it gets better. i always want it to keep going. it sprawls over the screen, Sergio Leone aided by Ennio Morricones' music and Tonino Delli Collis' photography in what is a true collaboration. you can pause it anywhere and the composition is spot on, its like a million great paintings joined together and called 'film'.

tonally the light filters through a muted dusty palette - glints of colour here and there accentuate a bowl of beans, a shiny button, or a drop of blood. its protagonists are violent and uncomplicated - the tale is a simple and dense meditation on greed, luck and death. Eli Wallach as 'il cattivo' is mesmerising, and i challenge anyone to not call his performance one of the greatest ever on screen. the film is a masterpiece as enigmatic as the "Mona Lisa' or "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even".

on the interactive Ritual Art of India

 set into a wall or by the side of a road - anywhere for that matter - i once came across a well tendered piece in the middle of a field - Indian ART crosses the borders of religion, myth, cult and magic - and all the while being interactive with passers-by. who, by the nature of worship and habit, will daub some colour on it, or place an object upon the formless that has been given form. this might be a flower or length of string, a bead, or some wax - it will differ from place to place. there is a practical purpose to it, and it has been in use for who knows how many years.


because of this, it galvanises community the way art should. it defies elitism. it doesn't require a museum or a gallery, or even a temple. it is an abstract visualisation of the divine - a communicative link between the known and the unknown.
Anish Kapoor has used such "pathway icons" as his prime inspiration. Minimalist painters like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko were seeking to open similar discussions on the inner and outer experiences.
but i like the rawness of these - the used quality - and the preservation is ongoing as for the most part they are outside in the elements, exposed to the cosmic intelligence they revere.

on Walker Evans

the image i like of Walker Evans is him driving around the countryside in the southern states of the US, on assignment for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's. It was never really defined what he was meant to be doing, but what it did do was enable him the freedom to chronicle a form of unofficial decorative art that grew out of a country on its knees.
so in between photographing things like old plantation mansions and deserted agricultural land, he focused on pictures of signs, billboards and storefronts. he passed through hundreds of towns - and the material for his art just presented itself.

his photos have sometimes been called "artless", but how he taps into what is directly in front of him is the art, and the ordinary becomes dreamlike -  because of his choice to take the picture.

on accidental installation #4 - art in motion

the initial idea of moving the cargo from point A to point B via whatever method opens up a process. balance and composition are the vital ingredients at play here, as they are in most artistic endeavours.  the intent is pure as well because the operators of the vehicles are at work, they are making a buck and have no other choice but to do it this way.
Aldous Huxley talks about "the virtue of integrity", which is basically about being honest towards oneself, with particular regard to art. there is a grit and ingenuity in these works that a lot of 'artists' could only hope to touch. they are  natural extensions to the location of an idea - born out of necessity sure - but isn't that how it should be?
                                                                                   

on goya

Goya. you stand in front of a Goya and things happen. first its the light that seems to illuminate from behind the canvas - cutting swathes through the more formalised components. When you stand in front of "The shootings of may 3rd, 1808", pictured here on the left, you cannot help but ride the painting like an ocean swell, its that moving. It occupies a wall to itself in the Prado, Madrid and is large - roughly 9 x 11 ft. It looks like it was painted yesterday.

on beards

beards have become popular again... one theory i had was that because of the lack of privacy perhaps its one way to protect some anonymity? people may wonder what does he really look like underneath the beard? but then i suppose you get recognised because of your beard. when i grow one my face starts to feel heavy, like i am carrying around a small animal.

they follow musical trends as well - the new folk scene seems to produce a lot of them, it gives the artist the look.

manicured and shaped beards are the worst. if you are going to grow one let it be free. don't interrupt the hairs natural flow by getting out the grooming tools and act like you have some prize winning garden on your face. A friend of mine with a large beard said the other day that he saves money on dish-cloths and pot scrubbers by using his facial hair.

on accidental installation #3

the image to the left i hesitate to call accidental because there is intent. the tarpaulins are covering something. what i like about it are the folds in the material and the sense of solid place that it has, as if it belongs. it reminds me of renaissance painting - in particular those that depict the death of the virgin. below are details from Hugo Van Der Goes (1480) and Fernando Yanez (1508). the drapery looks frozen like the tarps. cold and stiff. sculptural.

on The Dirty Three

i saw them a couple of nights ago in an old theatre. there is nothing like quality to level things out. to keep things real. you don't see it that much. nobody sounds like them, they're world class.

on Bio-Art

Last night on television was a short documentary on bio -artists. The idea of taking up a residency in a laboratory makes me cringe to begin with, but by the end of the show this was twofold. the 'bio-artists' - came off as Dr Frankensteins. sickly looking folk in lab jackets messing around with cells and placenta blood. aesthetically they were naive - a 6cm high 'jacket' growing? in a round vial - see photo. they then 'killed' the jacket by putting it in a petrie dish and squishing it with rubber gloved hands. it was really dumb.

They were attempting to make a point about life, but this 'jacket' was not self-sustaining or self-feeding. The cells self-perpetuated but of course they will. shaping it like a jacket is a cheap choice - a covering, a skin - and a really obvious attempt at being at the cutting edge of art yet not thinking beyond their wardrobes.

on Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton skirts a really strange area between postcard illustration and tripped out dreams. he painted "Trail Riders" in 1964 when he was 75. his style informs the modern low-brow techniques of recent times. it has a liquidity that produces a morphed space of unsureness. it sways like the ocean. Benton taught Jackson Pollock at the NY Art Students League in the early 1930's. Pollock always said that being there gave him something to rebel against, but because Benton was painting like this then, i think Pollock took a bit of the organic aesthetic on board.

on accidental installation #2

the decision of the person who dropped the bagged bottle to not pick it up defines it as installation, but they did drop it accidentally one would surmise. the depth and shape of the cracks participate as well by channeling the liquid in random design. Someone asked,"Was it a homeless guy?" Someone else asked."What was in the bottle?" i just happened upon the piece and it was probably gone soon after. It was TIME and SITE specific.

On Pollock & De Kooning

These 2 paintings were made at roughly the same time, but the Pollock is a little earlier. So De Kooning may have seen it? Tonally they are very similar. I don't like De Kooning. The pictures are muddy, messy and awkward. He has a strange attitude to women and the female form as well, verging on misogyny and at the least very angry towards them. Pollock called him a "French painter", suggesting that he covered things up with style.

Pollock is from another place altogether. When he happened upon the drip he invented a new artistic language and pushed it, abandoning the paintbrush and tapping into something raw that celebrated both sexes and the bubbling primordial soups of the cosmos. Not totally random but with mapped intelligence. "Painting is a state of being."

After Pollocks funeral, a story goes that De Kooning slurred, "I saw Jackson in his grave. It's over. I'm number one." Huh?

on graffiti #1

Graffiti is sloganeering. The most astute forms are absurdist social comment, and this form is the one that impresses me. A few words or letters - it works with the brick, wood, metal or concrete. Kind of like a badge on clothing.

You can tell its been done quickly - there is no attention to detail or precision writing - it is about getting it on. The adrenalin is visible in the letters.

Tagging is the worst form of graffiti. It is ego driven generic scribble that ruins the view.